here's some thoughts that hit me on my way to Taco Bell.
we've been talking a lot about Sublime instigating round after round of endless fratricidal violence which kept the X-Men locked in the superhero cycle of beating enemies and waiting for them to return, a process Sublime refers to as a "meaningless shadowplay."
NXM opens with Wolverine gutting a Sentinel, and a voice from off-panel (Scott) telling him that he can probably stop doing that now.
as has already been discussed, this sets the stage for most of NXM by establishing the obsolence of the old-school Sentinel, opening the door for the introduction of the new school Wild Sentinels and nano-Sentinels, which in turn is later brought to a head and resolved in the Rover/EVA/Tom Skylark love triangle, and that's the level i've been taking it on.
however, later, Wolverine is revealed to be generation ten of the Weapon Plus program's Super-Sentinels, though, of course, Logan himself doesn't know that and won't until much later.
so, right on the very first page, we have a Sentinel who's ignorant of the fact that he's a Sentinel being reminded that he's locked in a cycle of pointless fratricidal violence with another Sentinel.
i love GM.
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also, i had a thought about the Sublime Beast. the Sublime Beast was clearly Sublime manifesting in Hank's body, but at the same time a little fuzzy on its identity as Sublime; he doesn't actually remember everything, etc. i've generally taken that to mean that Sublime doesn't normally manifest on this level of conscious individual identity, that it's normally a more diffused, instinctual consciousness.
i've been of the opinion that Sublime essentially borrowed aspects of Hank's memories and personality to sort of patch over the holes in its sense of identity, and that part of the reason that it chose Hank as its primary host was because he knew more about mutant genetics than anyone alive, and that knowledge was useful to Sublime.
however, i'm kind of starting to think it may have been more than that that caused Sublime to bond with Hank. Sublime's primary motivation is to preserve itself, yes? it's just another fucked up thing trying to survive, or even on some level the aggregate of every fucked up thing trying to survive and pursue its own narrow, ignorant self-interest. it's the same thought (the illusion of self) divided into billions of boxes and repeating itself so loudly that it can't even think and freaking out at the possibility of being replaced (see also the Outer Church as the personification of the fear that joining the Supercontext entails loss of self).
after Cyclops left, Hank basically devoted himself entirely to pursuing two primary goals - keep the Institute and the X-Men going, and to save the human genome from extinction.
in other words, to preserve two things which may have outlived their usefulness. moreover, he's already reached a point of desperation by the end of Planet X - stranded in the middle of nowhere, with no rational hope of rescue, he's obessively scribbling incoherent notes on the wing of the plane with his claws. one can only imagine how bad he would be a few years later, locked in his lab with his best friends dead or departed with the school falling apart around his ears.
given the magickal framework within which GM thinks, and the recurrent theme of possession in NXM, it's hard not to see Beast's decision to take Kick at this point in his life in a sort of Faustian light, as if Hank was in some sense inviting Sublime in in exchange for the power to preserve what he felt needed to be preserved.
i think it's unlikely that he made it knowingly. it's possible that he made it totally unknowingly, but i think it's also worth entertaining the possibility that he made it semi-knowingly. he was awfully close to putting the pieces together. i think he knew on some level but managed to convince himself that he didn't.
it's interesting to note here the effect Kick has had on everyone who tried it up to this point - turning them into some twisted version of some repressed fantasy self blown up to outrageous proportions. QQ wants a cool bad boy image and that image ends up catching like wildfire and nearly destroying the school in some kind of insane punk rock fantasy of teenage rebellion. Sophie wants to be a superhero and valiantly sacrifices her life to defeat the villain. Esme becomes a nastier, younger version of Emma. i was going to say that Magneto becomes a crazed demagogue much like Hitler (who is basically the defining early influence in Erik's life), but that's only half-true. he splits into Hitler and Xorn, his idealism forever warring with his anger and wounded distrust of the world.
so when Beast goes "on the puff," he becomes a tyrant attempting to assimilate, store, control and most importantly preserve all the genomes he can get his hands on, trying to lock them up in his lab and keep them forever and ever for the sake of preserving them.
whoa, wait. there's major foreshadowing in Murder at the Mansion, with his obsessive attempts to store, catalog, and preserve the fragments of Emma. it's the same thing that the Sublime Beast does, on a more immediate scale.
anyway, the whole point of this is that Sublime is the personification of the urge to resist change because you're too lost in the idea of your own self, the illusion of selfhood, to accept your own replacement. however, that urge is inherently sterile. Xavier "wins" the battle with Magneto which has defined him, but now that he has what he thought he wanted his Dream can't deliver the promised Utopia. Magneto "wins" the battle with Xavier, and is in the same boat with the same stagnant end. Scott can't accept that his marriage to Jean is over, and that Xavier's time as head of the school is over, and so he leaves Emma (in a graveyard in autumn, no less) and the school because he thinks he just wants to replay endless reruns of his grief, but that leads to the pointlessly fucked up HCT future.
Sublime's ultimate wish-fulfillment is basically to stop evolution dead in its tracks, and basically just sit on a vat of genetic material forever and ever, and even when he's defeated (and the X-Men get their ultimate wish-fulfillment by fighting to the death of the last man and defeating the Last Bad Guy Ever - c'mon, you know that's what they're all about), all that's left is a barren wasteland. Jean is only able to stop that by breaking the cycle, accepting Emma as her replacement and moving on, sacrificing her own narrow and delusional sense of self-interest in the interest of the overall health of the system. which, i suppose, is the purpose of the Phoenix - cleansing through sacrifice.
oh, and the whole idea that being on Kick is like being in a movie directed by God ties into the recurring theme of memetics and ideas taking on a life of their own (e.g. Magneto on t-shirts, the Xorn meme redeeming Cassie, etc.), in that people write themselves into their own grand narratives of who they think they'd like to be and gives them the power to shape the world accordingly.
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finally, another thought which sort of builds on my previous post about Fantomex as a Lucifer figure: scale. the World is a microcosm nested inside the main Marvel Universe, and Fantomex sets the final chain of events in motion by escaping from it and breaking out into the larger universe around him. in the process, his actions lead to the destruction of the World, but also in the process Weapon XV escapes as well and seems to find some kind of fulfillment, and the gods of the World are punished, and so in a sense he fixes it, too. similarly, the Jean-Phoenix escapes the main universe for the next scale-level universe up, and by doing so she's able to fix it. i'm not sure what that means, other than the fact that it seems to be one of those fractal symmetries in narrative that GM's so fond of.
thoughts? |
